Too sweet for words

Because those two senators in one or two lines proved the point I’ve been trying to make for a number of years: we are too enamoured of form over substance, preoccupied with effect over cause; we too easily believe that a sugar coating can alter reality. In other words, we possess an innate sweet tooth and we love and live to dress it up. Both idiosyncracies/vices have cost us a pretty penny and worse, country.

Let’s consider the retreat argument first. The word retreat is - I quote the PNM Senator- “gloomy”. It means to draw back, pull away, recede.The last thing a new government should do is any of the former. To retreat would make it appear weak, as if it came to office unprepared. A new administration has to take the baton and run with it. The last thing this PP regime — faced with massive flooding, loss of property and of life since it took its oath- can do is retreat. It may not leave its population to drown, while from a dry beach resort, it contemplates political niceties, while it meditates how not to step on toes, how not to affect TT’s ever sensitive sensibilities.

If ever there was a time for direct government intervention it is now. What the people of TT need, after years of administrative abandonment, perhaps all they need is active, not more passive, love.

They have to know someone somewhere cares and is not helping themselves to a treat which is what these retreats were, treats for the PNM owners of the resorts employed. Treats for ministers. What else could they have been? Was the past PNM more effective, more efficient for its repeated treats and retreats? Not in the least. Perhaps had it retreated less and treated its people to more, it would still be in power today.

A political back back so you can be politically correct? Political suicide.

An out of the Order Paper question to anyone urging this government to retreat: Why no immediate appeal for former Prime Minister Patrick Manning — no neophyte — to retreat from the Red House, to retreat from the judiciary, to retreat from the Integrity Commission, to retreat from Marlene Coudray, to retreat from Calder Hart, to retreat from the prophetess, to retreat from damning his detractors, to just retreat once and for all?

That would have been advice better given and better deserved for someone who demonstrated such poor form and so little substance. If anyone needed to be told to retreat it was Patrick Manning.

Pity the PNM Senator. She did not want a dire picture painted of the economy, on the basis that it did no one no good, not the public, not the foreign investors (them again?). News flash. Everyone saw the monoliths Manning made, everyone witnessed the corruption and the t’ief and everyone is aware that the oil money ran through the nation like a dose of salts. Again. Too late for any sugar, saccharine, honey, syrup, any form of sweetener. TT is in the grips of the PNM’s potent monetary laxative, administered daily, monthly, annually from 2001 to 2010.

Oh, we bury our heads in the sand so. We refuse to face facts in evidence about the people and events in our lives: we feel we owe blind loyalty, or we do not want to endure hurt feelings. That’s a short term, cowardly approach. Isn’t it more prudent to consider reality in the immediate present than in the far future when it is beyond our horizon, out of our control? Isn’t it safer to accept who is who and what is what from early in the game? What the senator wants is for the PP to baby the population, to say to the citizens of TT that despite the PNM’s wild spending, money is no problem. She is suggesting that it is okay to be excessive in expenditure, but it is not on to talk about the waste.

While inventing a candied version of reality might be convenient for the senator and for the PNM, the people of TT need a break from so sugary a diet — it will kill them. TT’s citizens now more than ever require tough love.

They have to be informed of what they are facing as they, too, must put budgetary measures in place to deal with the fallout and fall short. They must be treated like adults not children. No more spoon feeding of vital information. Recess is over.

Dress up the facts to spare feelings? Political suicide. Money, unlike a senator’s reality, cannot be conjured into existence. As floods cannot be retreated away. Our disasters, natural and man-made, will not disappear on our refusal to discuss them.

Catastrophes must be confronted whether the person pointing them out is talking out of turn or whether he or she is speaking not quite as slowly, softly, as sweetly as we might wish the truth administered to us.